[PommeDeTerre]

jQuery is far closer to a "crutch" than it is a "power tool".

It may look like a "power tool" in the sense that it made certain awkward things much easier to do, but that's only true if you don't look at the bigger picture.

Taking a wider view, it becomes obvious that jQuery's usefulness arises mainly because the DOM and client-side web development as a whole is so broken in so many critical ways.

It indirectly offers what the browser developers should have directly offered many, many years ago. So it's clearly more of a "crutch" to help web developers hobble around the various browser-imposed limitations than it is a "power tool".

As some effort is made toward clearing up these browser limitations, jQuery's true nature as a "crutch" does become more obvious.